Dragon's Dogma(ドラゴンズ ドグマ Doragonzu Doguma) is a recent adventure game published by Capcom and developed by the same team behind Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 4. The game is an open world action adventure, where every decision made will affect gameplay in some way.

Dragon's Dogma was released in 2012 on May 22 in North America, and May 25 in Europe. An expansion Dark Arisen was released in 2013.

Strider - A class focused on speed. Uses daggers for close combat and bows for ranged attacks

Players will be given three AI controlled teammates called Pawns, who can be issued commands, such as "Go", "Help", and "Come". These characters will assist the player by giving information about enemies, among other things.

Dragon's Dogma offers a new feature to the action game genre: allowing the player to grab onto enemies to allow for a more varied means of attacking. For example, the player can grab onto the legs of a Griffin and then climb up it to attack its head for more damage.

A huge open world full of monsters will be available for the player to explore and quest within, as well as a large city environment, in which over 200 NPCs who will freely go about their day-to-day lives. These NPCs can be talked to with full voice acting.

Players will supposedly be able to look forward to between 30 and 100 hours, the former being for players who play normally, and the latter for players who wish to play the game to its fullest.

Story

A dragon, unseen in the kingdom for years, suddenly appears and wreaks havoc across the land. The dragon attacks a small village and steals the heart of the protagonist. The protagonist, alongside three teammates, then has to hunt down the dragon in order to take back their heart.

Characters

Quina (キナ) - Resident of Cassardis village and the main character's childhood friend. Quina is gentle but strong-willed, and is always concerned with the main character's safety.

Adaro (アダロ) - Chief of Cassardis village. Adaro holds a fatherly role to Quina and the main character. He is physically fit despite his age.

Duke Edmun (領王エドマン) - A hero who once slew a dragon and brought peace to the peninsula. He resides in Gran Soren Castle. With the awakening of the dragon, he's been building up his forces.

Aelinore (エリノア) - Aelinore is the third wife of King Edmun. She is gentle by nature; as such, she finds her life within the castle intimidating.

Development

Hideaki Itsuno stated that his team "made Dragon's Dogma and come up to this point through our experience of action games. We're trying to make a new genre: We're using our action heritage and putting that into an action RPG."[1]

In addition to Capcom's previous works (such as Breath of Fire,[1]Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Monster Hunter), Itsuno also cited the influence of other Eastern role-playing video games such as Dragon Quest and Western role-playing video games such as Fable and Oblivion.[1] Itsuno later explained that they have "seen a great deal of open-world action RPGs over the years," but that "there's never been one that really put everything together in the action parts. We figured that if there hasn't been a game made by people who understand how action works, then we ought to do it ourselves. We wanted a game where the player is thrown into the world and needs to figure out how to stay alive via nothing but his own controller." However, it will also be possible for characters to take a less action-oriented approach, with Itsuno stating that they are "making this game such that you can beat the monsters even if you build up EXP, collect good companions and/or pawns, and sit back and watch the battle unfold," and elaborating that while it is an action game, "that's not all that it is. You can fully configure your party and put as much thought as you like into battle, which is something we're doing for people who really want to get into this world."[2]

The game was developed by Capcom staff members that had previously worked on series such as Resident Evil[3], Devil May Cry, and Breath of Fire[4]. These include director Hideaki Itsuno[3], who previously directed games such as Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and Devil May Cry 4;[1] producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi,[1] who previously produced games such as Resident Evil 4 and Killer 7;[5] and Breath of Fire designer Makoto Ikehara, who worked on creating the fantasy game world and script elements during the early stages of production.[4]

The name Dragon's Dogma was chosen due to keystone place of Dragons in fantasy lore, and the key role of the game's dragon in explaining the themes underlying the game's plot.[6]

"I felt the name needed to have the word "dragon" because dragons are synonymous with the fantasy genre. We ended up settling on the name "Dragon's Dogma" because what the dragon teaches you is the underlying theme of the game."

Early version of Gransys map. (GDC 2013). The western area is innacessible in the finished game. Much of the eastern area is familiar though many changes have been made. For example the The Watergod's Altar is off the Cassardis beach, and has an underground path to a village beyond the Witchwood.

At the 2013 Game Developers Conference Hideaki Itsuno presented a talk Behind the Scenes of Dragon's Dogma describing the development process; In 2008 Capcom executives called for new 'million selling' IP to be devoped - the proposal that became Dragon's Dogma was based in part on an original undeveloped proposal made in 2000 which incorporated the "pawn" game idea. From 2008 the game was developed under the working title BBS RPG: one aspect of the design brief was to capture the enjoyable aspects of interactivity found on a Bulletin board system (BBS) throught the pawn sharing system; addition design specifications where for a open world game, with an action role-playing game playstyle. New programming features required for the game included a multipurpose character editor and open world map data streaming.[7] The initial map design was approximately twice the size of the final product, with separate regions corresponding to different levels of experience, up to level 100; separate and discrete parallel worlds existed for each player.[8] Final commercialisation of the product reduced the scope of the world design; [9] the original concept included playable areas consisting of the entire island of Gransys, a separate smaller island, "Dragon Isle", and the game's Moon.[7][10]

The game was fully voiced, with over 42,000 lines of dialogue. An early design decision was to use 'high fantasy' speech-patterns in the game, rather than using modern dialogue - the archaic language choice was made by the localizers, whilst the Japanese language version used more common speech. The actual text was simultaneously developed, rather than being written in Japanese initially and then translated. This avoided delays and compromises in tranlation and lip synching. Six languages were voiced English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese.[11][12]

During the press conference at Capcom's Captivate event in 2011, director Hideaki Itsuno said that Dragon's Dogma was a game he had been dreaming about making since his school days. He was able to realize it due to advancing technology, and had been directing a staff of around 150 people at Capcom Japan over the past two years development time (three years including conceptual phases).[13] As of April 2011, the game's development status was at 50%.[14]

Collector's Edition

A collector's edition of the game was released by Capcom, it was only available in Japan. A collector's box was included with the limited edition release containing: